Interested in Adopting an Open Textbook but Don’t Know Where to Start? Cook Library Can Help!

Open educational resources (OER) are free teaching and learning materials which are in the public domain or which have been distributed by their creators under open licenses—licenses which say the materials may be reused, revised, remixed, redistributed, and retained.

OER encompass everything from instructional content to course planning and learning assessment tools, in either digital or analog formats. Specifically, today’s OER take the form of open textbooks, online learning modules, recorded lectures and demonstrations, course outlines, syllabi, and lesson plans, quizzes, scoring tools, and grading rubrics, and much, much more.

Cook Library has created this OER guide to encourage and facilitate wider use of OER at Towson University.

We’d like to draw your attention to a new resource, Faculty Select, which allows TU faculty to find and access OER content, as well as find and request unlimited-user ebooks for purchase by the library. For OER ebooks, a link is provided to preview the content, along with an option to receive a course-friendly link which instructors can include in their syllabus or Blackboard course site if they choose to adopt the title for their course. For ebooks available for library purchase, faculty can preview the content and submit a short request form asking the library to purchase the book, using their department’s allocation of the library collections budget, pending approval by their department’s faculty representative.

Also, please don’t forget that you can always contact your department’s librarian for help locating OERs or any library content to support your teaching.

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This post was written by Garczynski, Joyce V.